Letter: Alarmist take on taxes

I found the Monitor’s Jan. 1 front-page article, “Most will face rare tax increase anyway” about payroll taxes to be rather alarmist.

For as long as I’ve been a bookkeeper, until a couple of years ago, Employee Social Security withholding has been 6.2 percent. Then it went down to 4.2 percent, supposedly giving people more money. But for a worker earning $50,000, that works out to about $1,000 a year. How many people spend more than $1,000 a year buying coffee and a donut every workday – 261 days times $5 a day equals $1,305. A worker earning less than $20,000 a year would pay about $100 more in taxes. The lump-sum might sound significant, but the weekly impact is fairly small.

Instead of getting people riled up about their payroll taxes, shouldn’t we be getting riled up about elected officials who make far greater amounts of money than the average citizen, who are still posturing at each other over the “financial cliff”? I’m tired of reading about both the Republicans and the Democrats posturing, without seeming to accomplish much of anything, except postponing decisions.

May we do more than “hope” that this new year might bring some positive change.